Autonomous driving has drawn significantly more attention globally in the past couple of years due to the recent breakthrough in several relevant domains. For example, internet companies such as Google, Baidu and Uber have invested heavily on artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing to promote their core business, which could happen to be the last missing piece to achieve highly automated driving in a commercially available way. However, how internet companies may play a role in the automotive industry remains unclear. Many emerging new business models may bring disruptive changes to the industry, and it is still an open question what is the core competence in the new autonomous driving domain. In many markets, the industry also faces both country-specific challenges and opportunities that will be addressed in this talk.

Biography

Dr. Kai Ni was the founder of autonomous driving technology at Baidu since its start in 2013 and led the team to finish road tests on public roads in Beijing at the end of 2015. He left Baidu autonomous vehicle team in Dec. 2015 and joined LeSEE (Super Electronic Ecosystem) as Vice President.

He got the Bachelor degree in Automation and the master degree in Computer Science both at Tsinghua University, in which Dr. Ni was working on THMR-V self-driving vehicle project. Later Dr. Ni got his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. After graduation he joined Microsoft as a researcher working on 3D maps and HoloLens projects. Afterwards Dr. Ni joined Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) at Baidu as a senior scientist. He was in charge of the autonomous vehicle project and also worked on the high-precision map project.